Sydney Freeland

Sydney Freeland (born October 10, 1980) is a transgender Navajo filmmaker. She wrote and directed the short film Hoverboard (2012) and the film Drunktown's Finest (2014), which garnered numerous acclaims after premiering at the Sundance Film Festival. Her second film, Deidra and Laney Rob a Train debuted at Sundance and was released on Netflix in 2017. 2Early life Freeland was born in Gallup, New Mexico, United States in 1980 to a Navajo father and a Scottish mother, and she was raised on a Navajo reservation. Freeland attended Academy of Art University in San Francisco. She is a 2004 Fulbright scholar, focusing her scholarship on a field study of indigenous peoples in Ecuador. She has a Master of Fine Arts in film, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in computer animation. Freeland is a 2007 Disney Scholarship recipient and a 2008 Disney Fellowship semifinalist. Freeland is also a 2009 Sundance Institute Native Lab fellow. 2Career Prior to making her first feature-length film, Drunktown's Finest, Freeland previously worked as a production assistant, as a writer and as a camera inter